Starting with a profile of a young white family's decision to stay in New York City, he characterizes their commitment to living in the city over the suburbs as "another tiny step toward racial equilibrium in a city that had been challenged economically and socially by decades of white flight." Roberts continues:

According to Census Bureau estimates released last week, in the year ending July 1, 2013, the city recorded the third consecutive gain in its non-Hispanic white population.

During that same period, the city gained more people than it lost through migration. Neither of those gains has probably happened since the 1960s, according to demographers.

The gains were all the more striking because in many cases they reflected the mirror opposite of change in some suburban counties, which historically have followed a different demographic trajectory from the city.

While the city’s non-Hispanic white population rose since 2010 (by a modest 24,000, or 1 percent, with the biggest gain in Brooklyn), it declined in the New York suburbs by 54,000, or 2 percent.

The black population stagnated in the city, but rose 4 percent in the suburbs. The growth rate among Hispanics was less in the city than in the suburbs (4 percent compared with 9 percent). Among Asians, it was about the same (8 percent in the city and 9 percent in the suburbs).

“The changing populations of New York City and its suburbs represent a sea change from major postwar trends, where blacks and Hispanics grew very rapidly in the city, while non-Hispanic white population declined,” said Andrew A. Beveridge, a sociologist at Queens College of the City University of New York...